But as President Barack Obama enters a critical period of attempted revival after a constantly off-course 2013, those top staffers won’t be the only ones shaping the year ahead. Changes are speculated for the communications and press operations, and the question of whether anyone will be fired over Obamacare still hangs in the air.

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“I suspect that we may have additional announcements in the New Year,” Obama said in his end-of-the-year news conference. “There’s a natural turnover that takes place. People get tired. People get worn out. Sometimes, you need fresh legs.”

Within the White House, though, many of the people who will be in charge of engineering the kind of year Obama needs to salvage his second term have already started shifting into place.

Here’s POLITICO’s list of six aides who will be emerging forces in the White House’s efforts to define 2014:

David Simas — deputy senior adviser for communications & strategy

There was a time, just a year ago, when people thought David Simas was going to head back to Massachusetts and run for office again. He’d been on the City Council in his hometown of Taunton, after all, and the open governor’s race and an interim appointment to John Kerry’s Senate seat were both floated as reasonable possibilities for the man who’d just come off running polls and focus groups for the president’s reelection campaign.

The job he decided to go back to instead was in the White House, where his long official title translates into turning the White House’s polling and other voter data into a targeting strategy to win support for the president’s policy goals. For much of 2013, that meant running the Obamacare outreach and communications campaign — a difficult enough task before the website pratfall that sent faith in the health care law and the president who pursued it plunging.

Simas’s job was never the technology, but his 2014 will be about the ongoing cleanup and public persuasion, especially now that people will actually be receiving their insurance under Obamacare and political opponents will be looking for any problems they can highlight to cast more doubt on the law. He’ll also be helping build the plans for the renewed push on immigration reform and the economic issues — starting with an increase in the minimum wage — that the president is going to focus on.

That all explains why Simas — along with White House communications director Jennifer Palmieri — is seen as one of the main contenders for prime office space down the hallway from the Oval Office should Dan Pfeiffer decide to depart as senior adviser.

The White House has a lot to juggle with Congress in 2014: work with Republicans to find enough passable legislation to show that the president hasn’t completely lost his juice; propose enough Democratic dream ideas to whip up the party base for November; and get invested in enough House and Senate races to help win back control of Congress for his last two years in office. Fallon will be the lead juggler.

Fallon, who’s shifting over after just half a year as Obama’s deputy communications director, has the kind of Hill experience that’s rare among the president’s top aides and that congressional Democrats have wanted more of in the West Wing for years. And not just any Hill experience: She rose through the ranks in the office of Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), eventually becoming the staff director for his Senate Democratic Policy and Communications Center. Along the way, she picked up a few pointers on finding that Schumer sweet spot between workable policy and policy that works to press the opposition at the polls.

She comes into the job with the raving endorsements from both Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), and hasn’t waited for her official start in January to begin mapping out a new legislative strategy directly with the president and to launch conversations on the Hill about what’s ahead. Will immigration reform pass in 2014 — comprehensively or in parts — or will Democrats beat Republicans up over its failure, and promise to get it done in 2015? Will Obama’s attempts to connect with progressive populism go beyond a couple of half-chamber applause lines in the State of the Union? Fallon will have a lot to do with those answers.